


never knew that it could mean so much

by seventhstar



Series: if you wanna i might 'verse [4]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Everything is Beautiful and Nothing Hurts, Gay, Ice Skating, Insecurity, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-13 22:10:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10522914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhstar/pseuds/seventhstar
Summary: "'You don’t just master a routine and skate it perfectly.' Yuuri steps out of the elevator into the hallway. 'You do everything -- commission music, design a costume, choreograph the program. You’re so talented that you could skate anything and still get a gold medal, but you never settle.'Viktor wants to be flattered, but he can’t help but think he’s heard this exact description of himself in a magazine interview."Or: Viktor, Yuuri, St. Petersburg, and choreography both on and off the ice.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The first person to correctly identify the song Viktor skates to gets a prize.
> 
> All of Viktor's beauty products actually exist. I don't know what game Yuuri is playing, although he feels like a Pokemon fan to me. 
> 
> The following fic is literally just some post-canon fluff about a) Viktor having emotions and b) gross Victuuri domestic life.

He doesn’t realize how tired he is until he stumbles, skates dragging against the ice, and has to grab the edge of the rink to steady himself. Viktor sighs, pushes his sweat-soaked bangs out of his face, and checks the clock mounted above him on the wall. _Five more minutes,_ he thinks. He won’t bother going over the choreography again; he’ll just hit shuffle on his mp3 player and skate whatever comes to mind.

Bright, bouncy pop starts playing, and Viktor dances. Viktor appreciates stupid love songs more now than he ever did when he was young and selfish. No jumps, not when he’s this exhausted; he flings himself across the rink, turning and turning and turning, mouthing along to the lyrics. He forgets grace and dignity. _Dear diary, I met a boy,_ he croons in his awful singing voice. Viktor remembers being fourteen, realizing why he gravitated to songs by women about boys instead of the other way around. _Dear diary, we fell apart…_

He steals some half-remembered choreography from one of Chris’s oversexed routines and does it, poorly, barely in time with the music, laughing as he slaps his own ass. He strings together a shell of a routine from whatever his tired body can manage. He thinks, dimly, that he should try something like this for his next exhibition piece, if only because no one would expect it.

He skates until the last note fades away and he drops, gasping, to his knees.

“Viktor?”

Yuuri is standing at the edge of the rink, arms folded over the boards. He’s wearing his coat and scarf; his hair is getting long, and it curls a little around his ears.

“Yuuri!” Viktor rushes to him, ignoring his aching thighs.

It’s rare that Viktor stays at the rink later than Yuuri does; Yuuri is the one with the stamina, so he’s normally the one who has to be dragged off of the rink at the end of the night, sometimes with threats, sometimes with the promise of sexual favors.

“Have I kept you waiting?”

“Ah, no,” Yuuri says. He’s lying, of course. But it’s sweet of him to pretend otherwise. “I was watching you skate…did you improvise all that?”

“Some of it. Some of it I borrowed from programs I liked.” Viktor shrugs. “Doing the same thing over and over again bores me.”

“It was beautiful.”

“Thank you.” Viktor says automatically, then his brain processes what Yuuri actually said. He steps off the rink; Yuuri already has his skate guards in hand. “What about it did you like?”

He’s always curious about what Yuuri sees in his skating. Yuuri will sometimes tell him, shyly, that he liked this element or that, but Viktor doesn’t quite get it. He’s good, he knows, he has the case full of medals to prove it. But Yuuri is so fluid, so musical at his best; he is an artist on the ice in a way that Viktor can never match. In time, Yuuri will learn all of Viktor’s technical skills, but Viktor’s not sure he’s capable of doing what Yuuri does.

He’s never told Yuuri this, because he knows Yuuri won’t believe him, not yet.

“What do you mean?” Yuuri asks.

“Technically, it was a terrible performance. Why did you like it?”

Yuuri flushes. “Do you have to coach me right now?”

Viktor finishes taking off his skates and puts them in his bag. He shoves his shoes on without bothering to untie the laces.

“I’m not coaching you.” He slides an arm over Yuuri’s shoulders and picks up his now packed skate bag in his free hand. “I really want to know. You always say you like watching me skate, but you’ve never said what about my skating inspired you.” Viktor nudges him with his hip. “I tell you what _I_ like about your skating, don’t I?”

Yuuri bites his lip, but says nothing.

Viktor squints against the wind as they step out into the cold St. Petersburg night. Yuuri’s arm comes up around his waist as they walk, skate bags swinging at their sides. It isn’t quiet at night here, not the way it was in Hasetsu, but the rumble of the city at night is soothing in its own way. When Viktor came to live alone here, more than ten years ago now, the sounds of the city were his talisman against the unnerving silence of his empty apartment. Even now, he can play urban white noise and fall asleep anywhere.

If he leans a little heavily against Yuuri’s side as their shoes scrape the pavement, Yuuri does not seem to mind.

He lives only blocks away, and the familiar buildings pass by unnoticed. Viktor barely sees the street signs or the names of the shops anymore. Mostly what he pays attention to are unexpected things: new lights in windows, unfamiliar cars parked in the street. Yuuri looks at everything, even months after he’s learned his way around. He says Russia is an alien place to him, but he says it fondly, so Viktor tries not to worry about it too much.

They reach his -- _their_ , Viktor thinks happily -- apartment building. Yuuri clears his throat in the elevator.

“You’re ambitious.”

Yuuri’s eyes are sparkling, the way they do when he’s thinking.

“Oh?”

“When I was in therapy..” Yuuri stops.

“When was this?” Viktor frowns. “You never mentioned -- do you need to see someone now?”

“No, no. It’s fine. I’m fine,” Yuuri says hurriedly. “We used to do this thing where I’d set small goals, every day, so that I wouldn’t obsess about doing things. You know. Instead of actually doing them.”

“Did it work?”

“Sometimes.” Yuuri shrugs.

He looks uncomfortable. Viktor wants to press him a little more, because he still feels out of his depth sometimes with Yuuri’s anxiety, but now is not the time. Maybe tomorrow, if Yuuri has a good practice.

Besides, he still wants to know why Yuuri likes his skating.

“You don’t just master a routine and skate it perfectly.” Yuuri steps out of the elevator into the hallway. “You do everything -- commission music, design a costume, choreograph the program. You’re so talented that you could skate anything and still get a gold medal, but you never settle.”

Viktor wants to be flattered, but he can’t help but think he’s heard this exact description of himself in a magazine interview.

It all sounds so impressive when it’s put that way. Viktor knows that he started commissioning his own music and designing his own costumes primarily because he was a perfectionist little brat who kept insisting he had “artistic vision” that nobody, especially Yakov and Lilia, could understand. He suspects all teenagers are like that at some point, and Viktor was merely blessed with enough money to make all his ideas reality and enough stubbornness to ignore all attempts at adult guidance.

Yuuri pulls his house key from a lanyard hanging around his neck and opens the front door. They leave their bags in a basket by the door and toss their workout clothes into the hamper. The sight of their clothes all mixed together makes Viktor unreasonably happy; he puts on a bathrobe and begins heating up dinner while Yuuri puts utensils and glasses of lemon water on the table.

“Steamed vegetables and chicken breast?” Yuuri makes a face as Viktor hands him a tupperware of hot food. They eat out of the containers most nights; Viktor has a dishwasher, because he’s lazy, but even loading two extra dishes a night is too much when they’re both so exhausted.

“After you win at Nationals, I’ll feed you anything you like.”

“What if I don’t win at Nationals?”

“Then we’ll switch to _unseasoned_ chicken breast!”

“No!”

They finish their meals, and put the tupperware in the dishwasher. Viktor fills their water bottles for tomorrow and puts them in the fridge. Yuuri slices some fresh lemon and adds it to the pitcher. Sometimes they bump into each other when they try to do the same tasks, but not as much as they did before. Like learning a routine, they’re mastering the choreography of domesticity. Someday he and Yuuri will move around each other, as easy as breathing.

It’s Thursday, so Viktor applies his clay mask to his face and his argan oil mask to his hair while Yuuri showers, and sits on the chair in the corner of the bedroom while Yuuri turns on his computer and emails his family. It’s a carbonated mask, and the first time Yuuri saw it, he burst out laughing, and Viktor pretended to be offended for a whole ten minutes before admitting he’d started buying it because seventeen year old Viktor had thought it looked cool. Yuuri is blessed with genetically perfect skin, but the first time he used Viktor’s Clarisonic, he kept touching his face in wonder all day. Viktor’s already ordered him one of his own.

When the masks are dry, Viktor goes into the bathroom to rinse everything off and shower. He can faintly hear music as he scrubs; Yuuri must be playing one of his video games to wind down before bed. He lets the water run down his face, through his hair, down his back, feels all the pain of practice drip down the drain.

Yuuri is already in bed by the time Viktor is dry and stripped down to his pajama pants to sleep; it’s only in deference to Yuuri’s modesty that he bothers with clothes at all.

(Sometimes he comes to bed naked anyways, because Yuuri is terrible at noticing subtle signs of attraction. Yuuri is so dense that sometimes nothing short of a pointed “I want to fuck you” penetrates.)

When they first moved in together, Viktor divided everything into halves, everything distributed equally between them. He was eager to show Yuuri that there was space for him in Viktor’s home just like there was space for him in Viktor’s heart. But as time passes, things migrate; their bottles are crowded together on the sink, their books side by side on the bookshelves, their too-similar workout clothes mixed up until no one knows whose clothes were whose to begin with.

Sometimes this bothers Viktor endlessly, because he is used to having everything in its place. Sometimes he’ll see something of Yuuri’s -- his sweater draped over a chair, his phone plugged into Viktor’s charger -- and smile so much it hurts.

Every sacrifice brings a commensurate joy.

The lights are out; Maccachin whuffles softly in sleep, curled up at the foot of the bed in the giant dog bed Viktor had bought in a fit of guilt when he moved Yuuri in. Not that she knows that, traitor that she is; after a lifetime of sleeping on Viktor, she’d taken to the bed like Yuri Plisetsky to leopard print, and now she won’t even get into bed with him when he’s alone.

They lie in bed together. Yuuri holds his hand under the covers. No matter how far apart they start, by morning Viktor knows they’ll be entangled with each other.

“You still haven’t told me what you liked about my skating today.”

Beside him, Yuuri shifts and says nothing. Viktor can just see his profile, tinted red from the light from the clock on the bedside. Beside the clock is a framed photo of Viktor, now autographed, that came with them after Viktor stole it from Yuuri’s room.

Viktor kept that photograph of himself skating in his room in Hasetsu. He used to have three or four here in the apartment, but now he’s slowly replacing them with others: Yuuri pair skating with him in Barcelona, one of Phichit’s famous selfie stick group shots, one of the Yuuri Katsuki posters from the train station in Hasetsu, an entire collage of Instagram shots of Maccachin.

(He’s selfish, he can’t help it. Everyone loves Viktor when he’s performing for them.

That’s not the part of him he wants Yuuri to love.)

“Or maybe it was actually terrible, and you don’t want to tell me…?”

“No!” Yuuri rolls over, so that his face is cast in shadow and the light just illuminates the curve of his cheek.

Viktor smiles.

“Ever since you came to Hasetsu, I’ve wanted to watch you choreograph a program.” His voice drops lower and lower, like he’s telling Viktor a secret. He’s always quiet about expressing his love to Viktor in words, though he’ll announce it on live television at full volume and he’ll carve it out on the ice so deeply Viktor imagines it’s visible from the stars. The sheets around them rustle as Viktor inches closer.

“You skate like you’re in another world,” Yuuri whispers. “I...want to see how you create that world.”

How strange this is. He’s always been watched, every second of his skating picked apart, everyone around him pushing him to make and remake and unmake himself year after year after year. Yuuri saw the same performance that all of them saw, and yet no one has ever described the way Viktor feels while skating so clearly before.

He’s still not used to this. He hopes he never is, really. He hopes the sound of Yuuri breathing beside him, the warmth of his fingers twined with his own, the bright blush Viktor can’t see but knows is there -- he hopes all these things always make him feel like his heart is a bird, beating its wings against the inside of his rib cage, straining to break free.

How strange it is to be loved.

“Sorry,” Yuuri says. “That’s probably weird…”

He can just see Yuuri biting his lip in worry. He always does this. (He never carries any chapstick, either, and Victor has taken to carrying a second lip balm just for him.)

“That’s the best thing anyone has ever said about my skating!”

Viktor closes the gap between them with his mouth.

He means for it to be brief, but when it comes to Yuuri, he always loses his head. They kiss once, twice, three times, Yuuri’s tongue against his own, before they can stop. Yuuri’s breath is warm and minty against Viktor’s face. He’s too close and it’s too dark to see Yuuri’s smile.

“Let’s choreograph a program together.”

Regardless, Viktor knows it is there.

“Okay.”

He’ll teach Yuuri everything he knows about choreographing programs. He’ll show Yuuri the notebooks of ideas Viktor has stacked on the top shelf in the living room -- the fragments of poetry, the scribbled song lyrics, the haphazard sketches -- and the box of CDs of music he hasn’t yet found a way to use. He’ll give Yuuri every piece of his love for the ice if Yuuri wants.

Viktor has never had any surety about the future; life has always met his love of surprises. But tonight the familiar lullaby of the city at night is making him sleepy. Yuuri is beside him, and Viktor’s heart is safe in his hands. All the things Viktor loves -- figure skating, Yuuri, Maccachin, the cries of the gulls in the morning -- are within his reach.

Viktor has spent years creating imaginary worlds to escape his dissatisfaction with the one he lives in. He doesn’t know how or when he wandered into contentment.

All Viktor knows is this: he wants Yuuri to teach him the choreography of life and love, and dance hand in hand with him forever.

“Let me stay close to you,” he whispers into the silence, and prays that Yuuri’s answer will always be --

 

 

[Some dark winter evening, Viktor will skate with Yuuri on the ice he’s trained on for over a decade. They will skate around each other, mimicking each other’s movements, as love songs play in the background. Yuuri will hold out his arms, his ring gleaming; he will skate backwards and away, and Viktor will laugh and follow.

He will grasp Yuuri’s hands, and Yuuri will say: “Don’t let go.”

 _Never,_ Viktor will think, heart full to bursting.

Their patchwork routine would never win them any medals. But they will make their own world together, and that will be enough.]

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> everything is victuuri and nothing hurts
> 
> i'm @pencilwalla on tumblr, please come yell at me about yoi there
> 
> also comments are very, very appreciated <3


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